Over the next six months there will be a lot of information coming out regarding coronavirus, Covid-19 and the responses thereto. A lot.
From the Wall Street Journal, May 15:
In a whistleblower’s wake, it’s worth asking what else has government lied about and when lying is justified.
In a sense the debate is over. Since 2023, an American majority has believed Covid came from a Chinese lab.
In 2004, 27 years after the fact, a Chinese virologist confided to an American counterpart that 1977’s flu pandemic began with the accidental release in China of a stored pathogen. Imagination isn’t strained to picture a similar confirmation eventually about Wuhan. The alternative, that the virus passed naturally from an animal population to the human population, will have its fans but is unlikely ever to be proved in such a way that would derail the lab-leak origin story the U.S. now believes.
This means coming to terms with another fact—the U.S. governing establishment’s urgent smoke screen around Covid’s possible origins to allay pressure from voters, the media and political entrepreneurs to confront China over its role in sparking the pandemic.
This week’s Senate testimony by career CIA official James Erdman III, largely ignored in the media, describes the background. Recall the press’s eagerness at the time to help stigmatize the lab-leak possibility. Ditto the CIA, on the alleged advice and active guidance of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dealings with Beijing must not be complicated by unproductive Covid recriminations. Such was the broad consensus. This self-interest, I suspect, would have prevailed even in the absence of an additional wrinkle—the U.S. government’s and Dr. Fauci’s role in sponsoring research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
I have likened the Covid origin riddle to the conspiracy of silence around the 1999 Russia apartment block bombings that brought Vladimir Putin to power. The U.S. didn’t choose Mr. Putin—Boris Yeltsin did. But the U.S. and its allies pulled together as a team to legitimize Mr. Putin by strenuously ignoring evidence that the bombings were orchestrated by his former secret service colleagues to aid his rise.
What’s the missing element in the story told by this week’s CIA whistleblower? The job of an intelligence agency isn’t simply to deliver the truth without fear or favor, but to provide intelligence support for U.S. administration policy, which continues to mean protecting China from Covid blowback.
In a sign of the times, it may be useful to rank recent examples of U.S. government disinformation toward voters in the degree to which legitimate national interests might be involved. Largely bipartisan, after all, was the urge not to disturb relations with China with Covid backbiting. In 2016, when an FBI chief improperly exploited bogus Russian intelligence to finesse Hilary Clinton’s email problem, polls were suggesting the U.S. electorate would handily award her the presidency over Donald Trump.
By 2020, impressive authorities were assembled to lie to the public about the Hunter Biden laptop in a way that required the silent participation of Mr. Putin—with what consequences for U.S.-Russia relations and his subsequent Ukraine miscalculation, we can only guess.
Or take this week’s First Amendment settlement between the U.S. government and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson. Clearer than ever, the Biden administration promoted deliberate disinformation about Covid transmission to justify its proposed vaccine mandates. These mandates, as Axios reported even at the time, were more about shifting blame for the still-raging pandemic to Trump voters than sound public medicine.
The trend is clear. As the U.S. government gave itself license to engage in disinformation aimed at the American people, its motives rapidly degenerated into the basely political and corrupt. Covid won’t be banished back to wherever it came from. Mr. Trump can’t be unmade as a president lionized by millions precisely because of the lies told against him by a once-respected establishment. One thing can be put right, but I’m still waiting for the bipartisan wise folk to raise a concerted protest against our descent into siloviki-style politics....
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